Wind farm visual impact assessment – part 2
The viewshed maps on this page are very detailed and may take quite a while to display in many web browsers, and may not render at all on small devices such as smartphones or tablets. They are provided purely for development purposes, and final versions will be optimised for faster display.
Introduction
In the previous post in this series we gave a brief overview of visual impact assessment for man-made structures, introduced the concept of viewsheds and considered how they are calculated. This was illustrated for a single structure, one of the wind turbines proposed for the Palings yard wind far, south of Oberon.
In this post we extend that to consider compound viewsheds for multiple structures.
Calculating compound viewsheds
The map below shows the independent, individual viewsheds (with Earth curvature and atmospheric refraction corrections) for three of the proposed Palings Yard wind turbines at a tip elevation of 170.5m at the indicated positions. By independent we mean that the viewshed for each turbine is separate and not combined with the others, although they obviously overlay each other by a large degree. The degree of overlap can be examined by toggling each independent viewshed on and off.